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Apr. 13th, 2014
W. H. Auden
Apr. 13th, 2014 11:34 am"I think a great many of us are haunted by the feeling that our society, and by ours I don’t mean just the United States or Europe, but our whole world-wide technological civilisation, whether officially labelled capitalist, socialist or communist, is going to go smash, and probably deserves to."
-- W. H. Auden
That sentence kept Auden's article from being published in Life. It was the 1960s and it supposedly seemed a little too anti-American. Rather than retract the statement, he took the loss. It would have been a big payday.
This piece on the poet lays out some of the intriguing layers of the man. I was particularly struck by his stark humility in his art and in his person. Success and fame did not seem to corrupt his character as it ordinarily does. How many people can withstand being looked upon as godly for much of their life and not be affected by it?
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He was disgusted by his early fame because he saw the mixed motives behind his image of public virtue, the gratification he felt in being idolized and admired. He felt degraded when asked to pronounce on political and moral issues about which, he reminded himself, artists had no special insight. Far from imagining that artists were superior to anyone else, he had seen in himself that artists have their own special temptations toward power and cruelty and their own special skills at masking their impulses from themselves.
[In support of this idea, we also get a quote from Virginia Woolf that runs along the same grain.]
"In your modesty you seem to consider that writers are of different blood and bone from yourselves; that they know more of Mrs Brown than you do. Never was there a more fatal mistake. It is this division between reader and writer, this humility on your part, these professional airs and graces on ours, that corrupt and emasculate the books which should be the healthy offspring of a close and equal alliance between us."
-- Edward Mendelson, "The Secret Auden" at The New York Review of Books
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-- W. H. Auden
That sentence kept Auden's article from being published in Life. It was the 1960s and it supposedly seemed a little too anti-American. Rather than retract the statement, he took the loss. It would have been a big payday.
This piece on the poet lays out some of the intriguing layers of the man. I was particularly struck by his stark humility in his art and in his person. Success and fame did not seem to corrupt his character as it ordinarily does. How many people can withstand being looked upon as godly for much of their life and not be affected by it?
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
He was disgusted by his early fame because he saw the mixed motives behind his image of public virtue, the gratification he felt in being idolized and admired. He felt degraded when asked to pronounce on political and moral issues about which, he reminded himself, artists had no special insight. Far from imagining that artists were superior to anyone else, he had seen in himself that artists have their own special temptations toward power and cruelty and their own special skills at masking their impulses from themselves.
[In support of this idea, we also get a quote from Virginia Woolf that runs along the same grain.]
"In your modesty you seem to consider that writers are of different blood and bone from yourselves; that they know more of Mrs Brown than you do. Never was there a more fatal mistake. It is this division between reader and writer, this humility on your part, these professional airs and graces on ours, that corrupt and emasculate the books which should be the healthy offspring of a close and equal alliance between us."
-- Edward Mendelson, "The Secret Auden" at The New York Review of Books
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Cats and Weather
Apr. 13th, 2014 04:43 pmPop is sitting out on the patio. I ask him, "Does it smell like rain to you?" He shakes his head and says, "No." That is all the encouragement I need to let the cats out. Though, Coco and Ash want to stay inside now. But Sammy runs out.
They keep pushing back the chance for storms. Now they are calling it for the pre-dawn hours. However, after last night's difficulties, I am willing to take my chances.
They keep pushing back the chance for storms. Now they are calling it for the pre-dawn hours. However, after last night's difficulties, I am willing to take my chances.